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[PDF] [DOWNLOAD] Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Full Ebook By Yuval Noah Harari. DOWNLOAD NOW!!! Click Link >>> Editorial Reviews. Review. An Amazon Best Book of the Month for February Yuval Noah Harari has some questions. Among the biggest. New York Times BestsellerA Summer Reading Pick for President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg From a renowned historian comes a.

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Uploaded by: ROCIO Publication Harari, Yuval N., author Sapiens: a brief history of humankind / Yuval Noah Harari. Yuval Noah Harari. Part Two. The Agricultural Revolution. Sapiens. A wall painting from an Egyptian grave, dated to about 3, years ago, depicting typical. Read and Download Online Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari in PDF and ePub. Go to the profile of Leisure Time.

Skip to main content. Log In Sign Up. Amol Nimsadkar. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher — or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency — is an infringement of the copyright law. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN bound.

The story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry. About 3. The story of organisms is called biology. About 70, years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history. Three important revolutions shaped the course of history: The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12, years ago.

The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only years ago, may well end history and start something completely different. This book tells the story of how these three revolutions have affected humans and their fellow organisms. There were humans long before there was history. Animals much like modern humans first appeared about 2.

But for countless generations they did not stand out from the myriad other organisms with which they shared their habitats. On a hike in East Africa 2 million years ago, you might well have encountered a familiar cast of human characters: These archaic humans loved, played, formed close friendships and competed for status and power — but so did chimpanzees, baboons and elephants.

There was nothing special about them. Nobody, least of all humans themselves, had any inkling that their descendants would one day walk on the moon, split the atom, fathom the genetic code and write history books. The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish.

Biologists classify organisms into species. Animals are said to belong to the same species if they tend to mate with each other, giving birth to fertile offspring. Horses and donkeys have a recent common ancestor and share many physical traits. But they show little sexual interest in one another.

They will mate if induced to do so — but their offspring, called mules, are sterile. Mutations in donkey DNA can therefore never cross over to horses, or vice versa. The two types of animals are consequently considered two distinct species, moving along separate evolutionary paths.

By contrast, a bulldog and a spaniel may look very different, but they are members of the same species, sharing the same DNA pool. They will happily mate and their puppies will grow up to pair off with other dogs and produce more puppies.

Lions, tigers, leopards and jaguars are different species within the genus Panthera. Biologists label organisms with a two-part Latin name, genus followed by species. Lions, for example, are called Panthera leo, the species leo of the genus Panthera.

Presumably, everyone reading this book is a Homo sapiens — the species sapiens wise of the genus Homo man. Genera in their turn are grouped into families, such as the cats lions, cheetahs, house cats , the dogs wolves, foxes, jackals and the elephants elephants, mammoths, mastodons.

All members of a family trace their lineage back to a founding matriarch or patriarch. All cats, for example, from the smallest house kitten to the most ferocious lion, share a common feline ancestor who lived about 25 million years ago. Homo sapiens, too, belongs to a family. Homo sapiens long preferred to view itself as set apart from animals, an orphan bereft of family, lacking siblings or cousins, and most importantly, without parents. Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes.

Our closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans. The chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother. Skeletons in the Closet Homo sapiens has kept hidden an even more disturbing secret.

Not only do we possess an abundance of uncivilised cousins, once upon a time we had quite a few brothers and sisters as well. We are used to thinking about ourselves as the only humans, because for the last 10, years, our species has indeed been the only human species around. Moreover, as we shall see in the last chapter of the book, in the not so distant future we might again have to contend with non-sapiens humans.

Humans first evolved in East Africa about 2. The result was several distinct species, to each of which scientists have assigned a pompous Latin name. Our siblings, according to speculative reconstructions left to right: All are humans.

Neanderthals, bulkier and more muscular than us Sapiens, were well adapted to the cold climate of Ice Age western Eurasia. This record is unlikely to be broken even by our own species. It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now, so 2 million years is really out of our league. On another Indonesian island — the small island of Flores — archaic humans underwent a process of dwarfing.

Humans first reached Flores when the sea level was exceptionally low, and the island was easily accessible from the mainland. When the seas rose again, some people were trapped on the island, which was poor in resources. Big people, who need a lot of food, died first. Smaller fellows survived much better. Over the generations, the people of Flores became dwarves. This unique species, known by scientists as Homo floresiensis, reached a maximum height of only one metre and weighed no more than twenty-five kilograms.

In another lost sibling was rescued from oblivion, when scientists excavating the Denisova Cave in Siberia discovered a fossilised finger bone. Genetic analysis proved that the finger belonged to a previously unknown human species, which was named Homo denisova.

Who knows how many lost relatives of ours are waiting to be discovered in other caves, on other islands, and in other climes. While these humans were evolving in Europe and Asia, evolution in East Africa did not stop.

The members of some of these species were massive and others were dwarves. Some were fearsome hunters and others meek plant-gatherers. Some lived only on a single island, while many roamed over continents. But all of them belonged to the genus Homo. They were all human beings. This linear model gives the mistaken impression that at any particular moment only one type of human inhabited the earth, and that all earlier species were merely older models of ourselves.

The truth is that from about 2 million years ago until around 10, years ago, the world was home, at one and the same time, to several human species. And why not? Today there are many species of foxes, bears and pigs.

The earth of a hundred millennia ago was walked by at least six different species of man. As we will shortly see, we Sapiens have good reasons to repress the memory of our siblings. The Cost of Thinking Despite their many differences, all human species share several defining characteristics.

Most notably, humans have extraordinarily large brains compared to other animals. Mammals weighing sixty kilograms have an average brain size of cubic centimetres. The earliest men and women, 2. Modern Sapiens sport a brain averaging 1,—1, cubic centimetres.

Neanderthal brains were even bigger. That evolution should select for larger brains may seem to us like, well, a no-brainer. We are so enamoured of our high intelligence that we assume that when it comes to cerebral power, more must be better. But if that were the case, the feline family would also have produced cats who could do calculus.

Why is genus Homo the only one in the entire animal kingdom to have come up with such massive thinking machines? The fact is that a jumbo brain is a jumbo drain on the body.

By comparison, the brains of other apes require only 8 per cent of rest-time energy.

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Archaic humans paid for their large brains in two ways. Firstly, they spent more time in search of food. Secondly, their muscles atrophied. Like a government diverting money from defence to education, humans diverted energy from biceps to neurons. Today our big brains pay off nicely, because we can produce cars and guns that enable us to move much faster than chimps, and shoot them from a safe distance instead of wrestling.

But cars and guns are a recent phenomenon. For more than 2 million years, human neural networks kept growing and growing, but apart from some flint knives and pointed sticks, humans had precious little to show for it. What then drove forward the evolution of the massive human brain during those 2 million years? Another singular human trait is that we walk upright on two legs.

The more things these hands could do, the more successful their owners were, so evolutionary pressure brought about an increasing concentration of nerves and finely tuned muscles in the palms and fingers. As a result, humans can perform very intricate tasks with their hands. In particular, they can produce and use sophisticated tools. The first evidence for tool production dates from about 2. Yet walking upright has its downside. The skeleton of our primate ancestors developed for millions of years to support a creature that walked on all fours and had a relatively small head.

Adjusting to an upright position was quite a challenge, especially when the scaffolding had to support an extra-large cranium. Humankind paid for its lofty vision and industrious hands with backaches and stiff necks. Women paid extra. Death in childbirth became a major hazard for human females. Women who gave birth earlier, when the infants brain and head were still relatively small and supple, fared better and lived to have more children.

Natural selection consequently favoured earlier births. And, indeed, compared to other animals, humans are born prematurely, when many of their vital systems are still under- developed. A colt can trot shortly after birth; a kitten leaves its mother to forage on its own when it is just a few weeks old. Human babies are helpless, dependent for many years on their elders for sustenance, protection and education.


Evolution thus favoured those capable of forming strong social ties. In addition, since humans are born underdeveloped, they can be educated and socialised to a far greater extent than any other animal. Most mammals emerge from the womb like glazed earthenware emerging from a kiln — any attempt at remoulding will scratch or break them.

Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom. This is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, warlike or peace-loving. It seems self-evident that these have made humankind the most powerful animal on earth. But humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full 2 million years during which they remained weak and marginal creatures. Thus humans who lived a million years ago, despite their big brains and sharp stone tools, dwelt in constant fear of predators, rarely hunted large game, and subsisted mainly by gathering plants, scooping up insects, stalking small animals, and eating the carrion left behind by other more powerful carnivores.


Just as woodpeckers specialise in extracting insects from the trunks of trees, the first humans specialised in extracting marrow from bones. Why marrow? Well, suppose you observe a pride of lions take down and devour a giraffe. Only then would you and your band dare approach the carcass, look cautiously left and right — and dig into the edible tissue that remained. This is a key to understanding our history and psychology.

For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. It was only , years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis, and only in the last , years — with the rise of Homo sapiens — that man jumped to the top of the food chain. That spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences.



Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump. A Race of Cooks A significant step on the way to the top was the domestication of fire. Some human species may have made occasional use of fire as early as , years ago.

By about , years ago, Homo erectus, Neanderthals and the forefathers of Homo sapiens were using fire on a daily basis. Humans now had a dependable source of light and warmth, and a deadly weapon against prowling lions. Not long afterwards, humans may even have started deliberately to torch their neighbourhoods.

In addition, once the fire died down, Stone Age entrepreneurs could walk through the smoking remains and harvest charcoaled animals, nuts and tubers. But the best thing fire did was cook.

Foods that humans cannot digest in their natural forms — such as wheat, rice and potatoes — became staples of our diet thanks to cooking. Cooking killed germs and parasites that infested food.

Humans also had a far easier time chewing and digesting old favourites such as fruits, nuts, insects and carrion if they were cooked.


Some scholars believe there is a direct link between the advent of cooking, the shortening of the human intestinal track, and the growth of the human brain. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.

The power of almost all animals depends on their bodies: Though they may harness winds and currents, they are unable to control these natural forces, and are always constrained by their physical design. Eagles, for example, identify thermal columns rising from the ground, spread their giant wings and allow the hot air to lift them upwards.

Yet eagles cannot control the location of the columns, and their maximum carrying capacity is strictly proportional to their wingspan. When humans domesticated fire, they gained control of an obedient and potentially limitless force. Unlike eagles, humans could choose when and where to ignite a flame, and they were able to exploit fire for any number of tasks.

Most importantly, the power of fire was not limited by the form, structure or strength of the human body. A single woman with a flint or fire stick could burn down an entire forest in a matter of hours. The domestication of fire was a sign of things to come. They could now scare away lions, warm themselves during cold nights, and burn down the occasional forest. Yet counting all species together, there were still no more than perhaps a million humans living between the Indonesian archipelago and the Iberian peninsula, a mere blip on the ecological radar.

Our own species, Homo sapiens, was already present on the world stage, but so far it was just minding its own business in a corner of Africa. Thanks to the blessings of fire, they had smaller teeth and jaws than their ancestors, whereas they had massive brains, equal in size to ours.

Scientists also agree that about 70, years ago, Sapiens from East Africa spread into the Arabian peninsula, and from there they quickly overran the entire Eurasian landmass. When Homo sapiens landed in Arabia, most of Eurasia was already settled by other humans. What happened to them? There are two conflicting theories. As the African immigrants spread around the world, they bred with other human populations, and people today are the outcome of this interbreeding.


Archaeologists have discovered the bones of Neanderthals who lived for many years with severe physical handicaps, evidence that they were cared for by their relatives. According to the Interbreeding Theory, when Sapiens spread into Neanderthal lands, Sapiens bred with Neanderthals until the two populations merged.

They are a mixture of Sapiens and Neanderthals. According to this theory, Sapiens and other humans had different anatomies, and most likely different mating habits and even body odours.

They would have had little sexual interest in one another. And even if a Neanderthal Romeo and a Sapiens Juliet fell in love, they could not produce fertile children, because the genetic gulf separating the two populations was already unbridgeable.

The two populations remained completely distinct, and when the Neanderthals died out, or were killed off, their genes died with them. According to this view, Sapiens replaced all the previous human populations without merging with them. If that is the case, the lineages of all contemporary humans can be traced back, exclusively, to East Africa, 70, years ago. Map 1. Homo sapiens conquers the globe. A lot hinges on this debate.

From an evolutionary perspective, 70, years is a relatively short interval. If the Replacement Theory is correct, all living humans have roughly the same genetic baggage, and racial distinctions among them are negligible. But if the Interbreeding Theory is right, there might well be genetic differences between Africans, Europeans and Asians that go back hundreds of thousands of years.


In recent decades the Replacement Theory has been the common wisdom in the field. But that ended in , when the results of a four-year effort to map the Neanderthal genome were published. Geneticists were able to collect enough intact Neanderthal DNA from fossils to make a broad comparison between it and the DNA of contemporary humans.

The results stunned the scientific community. A second shock came several months later, when DNA extracted from the fossilised finger from Denisova was mapped. Although differences between them were not large enough to completely prevent fertile intercourse, they were sufficient to make such contacts very rare. How then should we understand the biological relatedness of Sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans?

Clearly, they were not completely different species like horses and donkeys. On the other hand, they were not just different populations of the same species, like bulldogs and spaniels. Biological reality is not black and white. There are also important grey areas. There must have been a point when the two populations were already quite different from one another, but still capable on rare occasions of having sex and producing fertile offspring.

Then another mutation severed this last connecting thread, and they went their separate evolutionary ways. It seems that about 50, years ago, Sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans were at that borderline point. They were almost, but not quite, entirely separate species. As we shall see in the next chapter, Sapiens were already very different from Neanderthals and Denisovans not only in their genetic code and physical traits, but also in their cognitive and social abilities, yet it appears it was still just possible, on rare occasions, for a Sapiens and a Neanderthal to produce a fertile offspring.

So the populations did not merge, but a few lucky Neanderthal genes did hitch a ride on the Sapiens Express. It is unsettling — and perhaps thrilling — to think that we Sapiens could at one time have sex with an animal from a different species, and produce children together. A speculative reconstruction of a Neanderthal child.

Genetic evidence hints that at least some Neanderthals may have had fair skin and hair. One possibility is that Homo sapiens drove them to extinction. Imagine a Sapiens band reaching a Balkan valley where Neanderthals had lived for hundreds of thousands of years. Sapiens were more proficient hunters and gatherers — thanks to better technology and superior social skills — so they multiplied and spread.


It may well be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history. Imagine how things might have turned out had the Neanderthals or Denisovans survived alongside Homo sapiens. What kind of cultures, societies and political structures would have emerged in a world where several different human species coexisted? How, for example, would religious faiths have unfolded? Would Neanderthals have been able to serve in the Roman legions, or in the sprawling bureaucracy of imperial China?

Would the American Declaration of Independence hold as a self-evident truth that all members of the genus Homo are created equal? Would Karl Marx have urged workers of all species to unite? Our lack of brothers and sisters makes it easier to imagine that we are the epitome of creation, and that a chasm separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. When Charles Darwin indicated that Homo sapiens was just another kind of animal, people were outraged.

Even today many refuse to believe it. Had the Neanderthals survived, would we still imagine ourselves to be a creature apart? Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals.

They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate. Whether Sapiens are to blame or not, no sooner had they arrived at a new location than the native population became extinct. The last remains of Homo soloensis are dated to about 50, years ago. Homo denisova disappeared shortly thereafter. Neanderthals made their exit roughly 30, years ago. The last dwarf-like humans vanished from Flores Island about 12, years ago.

They left behind some bones, stone tools, a few genes in our DNA and a lot of unanswered questions. They also left behind us, Homo sapiens, the last human species. How did we manage to settle so rapidly in so many distant and ecologically different habitats?

How did we push all other human species into oblivion? The debate continues to rage. The most likely answer is the very thing that makes the debate possible: Homo sapiens conquered the world thanks above all to its unique language.

In the intervening millennia, even though these archaic Sapiens looked just like us and their brains were as big as ours, they did not enjoy any marked advantage over other human species, did not produce particularly sophisticated tools, and did not accomplish any other special feats. In fact, in the first recorded encounter between Sapiens and Neanderthals, the Neanderthals won.


This poor record of achievement has led scholars to speculate that the internal structure of the brains of these Sapiens was probably different from ours. They looked like us, but their cognitive abilities — learning, remembering, communicating — were far more limited.

Teaching such an ancient Sapiens English, persuading him of the truth of Christian dogma, or getting him to understand the theory of evolution would probably have been hopeless undertakings.

Conversely, we would have had a very hard time learning his language and understanding his way of thinking. But then, beginning about 70, years ago, Homo sapiens started doing very special things.


Within a remarkably short period, Sapiens reached Europe and East Asia. About 45, years ago, they somehow crossed the open sea and landed in Australia — a continent hitherto untouched by humans. The period from about 70, years ago to about 30, years ago witnessed the invention of boats, oil lamps, bows and arrows and needles essential for sewing warm clothing.

The first objects that can reliably be called art date from this era see the Stadel lion-man on this page , as does the first clear evidence for religion, commerce and social stratification. They maintain that the people who drove the Neanderthals to extinction, settled Australia, and carved the Stadel lion-man were as intelligent, creative and sensitive as we are.

The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70, and 30, years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. What caused it? The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language. We might call it the Tree of Knowledge mutation. It was a matter of pure chance, as far as we can tell. What was so special about the new Sapiens language that it enabled us to conquer the world?

Every animal has some kind of language. Even insects, such as bees and ants, know how to communicate in sophisticated ways, informing one another of the whereabouts of food.

Neither was it the first vocal language. Many animals, including all ape and monkey species, have vocal languages. For example, green monkeys use calls of various kinds to communicate.

An eagle! A lion! When the same group heard a recording of the second call, the lion warning, they quickly scrambled up a tree. Sapiens can produce many more distinct sounds than green monkeys, but whales and elephants have equally impressive abilities. A parrot can say anything Albert Einstein could say, as well as mimicking the sounds of phones ringing, doors slamming and sirens wailing. What, then, is so special about our language?

The most common answer is that our language is amazingly supple. We can connect a limited number of sounds and signs to produce an infinite number of sentences, each with a distinct meaning. We can thereby ingest, store and communicate a prodigious amount of information about the surrounding world. She can then describe the exact location, including the different paths leading to the area.


A second theory agrees that our unique language evolved as a means of sharing information about the world. But the most important information that needed to be conveyed was about humans, not about lions and bison. Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. According to this theory Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal. Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction.

It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. The body is human, but the head is leonine. This is one of the first indisputable examples of art, and probably of religion, and of the ability of the human mind to imagine things that do not really exist. The amount of information that one must obtain and store in order to track the ever- changing relationships of a few dozen individuals is staggering.

In a band of fifty individuals, there are 1, one-on-one relationships, and countless more complex social combinations. All apes show a keen interest in such social information, but they have trouble gossiping effectively.


It comes so naturally to us that it seems as if our language evolved for this very purpose. But more often, they gossip about the professor who caught her husband cheating, or the quarrel between the head of the department and the dean, or the rumours that a colleague used his research funds to buy a Lexus.

Gossip usually focuses on wrongdoings. Rumour-mongers are the original fourth estate, journalists who inform society about and thus protect it from cheats and freeloaders. Most likely, both the gossip theory and the there-is-a-lion-near-the-river theory are valid.

Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled. Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution.

You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting. People who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer. But fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively.



Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. The Legend of Peugeot Our chimpanzee cousins usually live in small troops of several dozen individuals. They form close friendships, hunt together and fight shoulder to shoulder against baboons, cheetahs and enemy chimpanzees.

Their social structure tends to be hierarchical. The alpha male strives to maintain social harmony within his troop. When two individuals fight, he will intervene and stop the violence. Less benevolently, he might monopolise particularly coveted foods and prevent lower-ranking males from mating with the females. When two males are contesting the alpha position, they usually do so by forming extensive coalitions of supporters, both male and female, from within the group.

Ties between coalition members are based on intimate daily contact — hugging, touching, kissing, grooming and mutual favours. Just as human politicians on election campaigns go around shaking hands and kissing babies, so aspirants to the top position in a chimpanzee group spend much time hugging, back-slapping and kissing baby chimps.

The alpha male usually wins his position not because he is physically stronger, but because he leads a large and stable coalition. These coalitions play a central part not only during overt struggles for the alpha position, but in almost all day-to-day activities.

Members of a coalition spend more time together, share food, and help one another in times of trouble. There are clear limits to the size of groups that can be formed and maintained in such a way.

In order to function, all members of a group must know each other intimately. Two chimpanzees who have never met, never fought, and never engaged in mutual grooming will not know whether they can trust one another, whether it would be worthwhile to help one another, and which of them ranks higher. Under natural conditions, a typical chimpanzee troop consists of about twenty to fifty individuals.

As the number of chimpanzees in a troop increases, the social order destabilises, eventually leading to a rupture and the formation of a new troop by some of the animals. Only in a handful of cases have zoologists observed groups larger than a hundred. Separate groups seldom cooperate, and tend to compete for territory and food. Humans, like chimps, have social instincts that enabled our ancestors to form friendships and hierarchies, and to hunt or fight together.

However, like the social instincts of chimps, those of humans were adapted only for small intimate groups. When the group grew too large, its social order destabilised and the band split.

Even if a particularly fertile valley could feed archaic Sapiens, there was no way that so many strangers could live together. How could they agree who should be leader, who should hunt where, or who should mate with whom? In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands.

But even gossip has its limits. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than human beings. Even today, a critical threshold in human organisations falls somewhere around this magic number.

Below this threshold, communities, businesses, social networks and military units can maintain themselves based mainly on intimate acquaintance and rumour-mongering. There is no need for formal ranks, titles and law books to keep order. A small family business can survive and flourish without a board of directors, a CEO or an accounting department. But once the threshold of individuals is crossed, things can no longer work that way. You cannot run a division with thousands of soldiers the same way you run a platoon.

Successful family businesses usually face a crisis when they grow larger and hire more personnel. If they cannot reinvent themselves, they go bust. How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction.

Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation — whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe — is rooted in common myths that exist only in peoples collective imagination.





The legend of Peugeot affords us a good example. An icon that somewhat resembles the Stadel lion-man appears today on cars, trucks and motorcycles from Paris to Sydney.

Peugeot began as a small family business in the village of Valentigney, just kilometres from the Stadel Cave. Today the company employs about , people worldwide, most of whom are complete strangers to each other. These strangers cooperate so effectively that in Peugeot produced more than 1.


Peugeot has managers and shareholders, but neither do they constitute the company. All the managers could be dismissed and all its shares sold, but the company itself would remain intact. If a judge were to mandate the dissolution of the company, its factories would remain standing and its workers, accountants, managers and shareholders would continue to live — but Peugeot SA would immediately vanish.

In short, Peugeot SA seems to have no essential connection to the physical world. Does it really exist? Peugeot is a figment of our collective imagination. But it exists as a legal entity. Just like you or me, it is bound by the laws of the countries in which it operates. It can open a bank account and own property. It pays taxes, and it can be sued and even prosecuted separately from any of the people who own or work for it. Homo sapiens lived for untold millennia without them.

During most of recorded history property could be owned only by flesh-and-blood humans, the kind that stood on two legs and had big brains. If in thirteenth-century France Jean set up a wagon-manufacturing workshop, he himself was the business. If Jean had borrowed 1, gold coins to set up his workshop and the business failed, he would have had to repay the loan by selling his private property — his house, his cow, his land. He might even have had to sell his children into servitude.

He was fully liable, without limit, for all obligations incurred by his workshop. If you had lived back then, you would probably have thought twice before you opened an enterprise of your own. And indeed this legal situation discouraged entrepreneurship. People were afraid to start new businesses and take economic risks.



Despite their having no real bodies, the American legal system treats corporations as legal persons, as if they were flesh-and-blood human beings. And so did the French legal system back in , when Armand Peugeot, who had inherited from his parents a metalworking shop that produced springs, saws and bicycles, decided to go into the automobile business.

To that end, he set up a limited liability company. He named the company after himself, but it was independent of him. If one of the cars broke down, the buyer could sue Peugeot, but not Armand Peugeot. If the company borrowed millions of francs and then went bust, Armand Peugeot did not owe its creditors a single franc. The loan, after all, had been given to Peugeot, the company, not to Armand Peugeot, the Homo sapiens.

Armand Peugeot died in Peugeot, the company, is still alive and well. How exactly did Armand Peugeot, the man, create Peugeot, the company? It all revolved around telling stories, and convincing people to believe them. Seeing that the priest had properly and assiduously observed all the procedures, millions of devout French Catholics behaved as if God really existed in the consecrated bread and wine.


When in Armand Peugeot wanted to create his company, he paid a lawyer to go through all these sacred procedures. Once the lawyer had performed all the right rituals and pronounced all the necessary spells and oaths, millions of upright French citizens behaved as if the Peugeot company really existed. Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it.

Much of history revolves around this question: Yet when it succeeds, it gives Sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals. Over the years, people have woven an incredibly complex network of stories. Within this network, fictions such as Peugeot not only exist, but also accumulate immense power. An imagined reality is not a lie. I lie when I say that there is a lion near the river when I know perfectly well that there is no lion there.

There is nothing special about lies. Green monkeys and chimpanzees can lie. This alarm conveniently frightened away a fellow monkey who had just found a banana, leaving the liar all alone to steal the prize for itself. Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world.




Bypassing the Genome The ability to create an imagined reality out of words enabled large numbers of strangers to cooperate effectively. But it also did something more. Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths — by telling different stories.

Under the right circumstances myths can change rapidly. In the French population switched almost overnight from believing in the myth of the divine right of kings to believing in the myth of the sovereignty of the people. Consequently,ever since the Cognitive Revolution Homo sapiens has been able to revise its behaviour rapidly in accordance with changing needs. This opened a fast lane of cultural evolution, bypassing the traffic jams of genetic evolution. Speeding down this fast lane, Homo sapiens soon far outstripped all other human and animal species in its ability to cooperate.

The behaviour of other social animals is determined to a large extent by their genes. DNA is not an autocrat. Animal behaviour is also influenced by environmental factors and individual quirks.

Nevertheless, in a given environment, animals of the same species will tend to behave in a similar way. For example, common chimpanzees have a genetic tendency to live in hierarchical groups headed by an alpha male. Members of a closely related chimpanzee species, bonobos, usually live in more egalitarian groups dominated by female alliances.

Female common chimpanzees cannot take lessons from their bonobo relatives and stage a feminist revolution. Male chimps cannot gather in a constitutional assembly to abolish the office of alpha male and declare that from here on out all chimps are to be treated as equals.

For similar reasons, archaic humans did not initiate any revolutions.

As far as we can tell, changes in social patterns, the invention of new technologies and the settlement of alien habitats resulted from genetic mutations and environmental pressures more than from cultural initiatives. This is why it took humans hundreds of thousands of years to make these steps.

Two million years ago, genetic mutations resulted in the appearance of a new human species called Homo erectus. Its emergence was accompanied by the development of a new stone tool technology, now recognised as a defining feature of this species. As long as Homo erectus did not undergo further genetic alterations, its stone tools remained roughly the same — for close to 2 million years!

In contrast, ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have been able to change their behaviour quickly, transmitting new behaviours to future generations without any need of genetic or environmental change.

As a prime example, consider the repeated appearance of childless elites, such as the Catholic priesthood, Buddhist monastic orders and Chinese eunuch bureaucracies. The existence of such elites goes against the most fundamental principles of natural selection, since these dominant members of society willingly give up procreation. This abstinence does not result from unique environmental conditions such as a severe lack of food or want of potential mates. Nor is it the result of some quirky genetic mutation.


She had managed to be a part of five very different sociopolitical systems, though her DNA remained exactly the same. In a one-on-one brawl, a Neanderthal would probably have beaten a Sapiens. Neanderthals could share information about the whereabouts of lions, but they probably could not tell — and revise — stories about tribal spirits.

Without an ability to compose fiction, Neanderthals were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers, nor could they adapt their social behaviour to rapidly changing challenges. Archaeologists excavating 30,year-old Sapiens sites in the European heartland occasionally find there seashells from the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts.

In all likelihood, these shells got to the continental interior through long-distance trade between different Sapiens bands. Neanderthal sites lack any evidence of such trade. Each group manufactured its own tools from local materials. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App.

Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. Yuval Noah Harari has some questions.

Among the biggest: His ideas are interesting and often amusing: Why have humans managed to build astonishingly large populations when other primate groups top out at individuals? Who cultivated whom, humans or wheat? Throughout, Harari returns frequently to another question: Does all this progress make us happier, our lives easier?

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There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. Harari primarily presents an hypothesis as to how Homo sapiens who successfully migrated out of Africa circa 70 kya thousand years ago and thereafter, successfully dominating the planet, differed from earlier Homo sapiens who attempted out migration previously e. Keep in mind that Homo neanderthals in Europe and Homo erectus in Asia had climate and environment adaptations that sapiens did not have and were separate species.

Harari claims assumes that the later sapiens differed from the earlier sapiens in only one way. They had evolved the ability to form an "inter-subjective reality," as opposed to objective reality physical or subjective reality in only one person's mind.

They were able to tell stories and believe them, independent of physical reality. Everything from myth to religion to nations to moral codes to money are inter-subjective realities according to Harari.

They have force in the physical world as long as people believe them, and cease to exist the moment people no longer believe them. This explains how people could cooperate in groups larger than , giving them a military and security advantage, and encouraging specialization which eventually gave them a technological advantage.

Moreover, Harari claims assumes all these later sapiens were genetically identical, and that the variations in societies are purely cultural, i. He presents history as an erratic evolution toward global unity, which is essentially demanded by the nature of inter-subjective realities, requiring belief of all those in mutual frequent contact, but he doesn't say how. In fact, Harari presents only anecdotal evidence for his claim. He presents no empirical studies regarding the flexibility of humans toward inter-subjective realities, and no mathematical models of its development, evolutionary advantage, or stability.

He describes the scientific method as an important development, and requires it to include both mathematical models and verification of them. But he does not use either in his treatise.

Thus he presents an important and interesting hypothesis, but not in a scientific manner. He makes not even suggestions as to how to further formulate or verify it as a scientific theory. Perhaps he is trapped in the inter-subjective reality of history as liberal arts, not science.

The term "intersubjective" does exist in the literature of psychology and philosophy, primarily as a synonym for "agreement," but there is no agreement about its definition Gillespie and Cornish , Journal for Theory of Social Behavior state: If we take social life to be founded on interactions then intersubjectivity should be a core concept for the social sciences in general and understanding social behaviour in particular.

Perhaps because of this broad relevancy research has been fragmented and at least six definitions are in circulation. Most simplistically, intersubjectivity has been used to refer to agreement in the sense of having a shared definition of an object. The study of the evolution of cooperation is a hot topic, with political scientists, biologists, mathematicians and even physicists all having theories, and much data collected and many math models developed.

It is apparent Harari is aware of this, but does not tell us how his theory fits in. I can only conclude he finds his powers of popular persuasion greater than his powers of scientific persuasion and critical analysis, so he writes a long book instead of a focused research paper.

By the way, you can find excellent video summaries and reviews of this book on the web, and even a "summary" for sale as an eBook. I originally got interested from the video summary. Near the end Harari reports on happiness research.

In this section of the book he takes exception to his usual approach, giving us descriptions of studies and names of researchers so we can trace where these conclusions come from. The book is worth reading for this section.

Occasionally Harari gets facts wrong. You won't realize this unless you have investigated the matter separately. I noticed it because his description of the origin of the caste system in India was wrong, according to current research. Harari tries to present himself as outside modern factions or inter-subjective realities , such as nature vs.

But without conscious explication, he suffuses his book with the assumption that any modern human if taken from birth is equally at home in any of the current or historical inter-subjective realities. He does not propose or even consider experiments to determine culture-vs-genetics. So he proposes this important genetic ability evolved in a small population on a single continent between kya and 70kya, but that no differentiating evolution has occurred since then.

The question of whether the degree or style of inter-subjectivity is as universal as he implies is important for several reasons. Harari proposes the world is "different" since , with no war between major powers, no more empires expanding by territorial acquisition.

He suggests some reasons for this cost of nuclear war, for example which are unverified.

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